5 Hurdles to Clear for Test Automation in Your Mobile Testing

Developing your mobile app is just the beginning. To leverage the 3 billion strong Smartphone carrying audience you have to make sure your app is running fine on all types of devices, mobile operating systems, and new and old versions of everything.

That takes a lot of mobile testing. The only way to cover it all is with test automation. Yet to many, that is easier said than done. For a process that is supposed to make the mobile testing experience simpler, there are a lot of people that find migrating to a lot more complicated.

It’s the fear of implementing test automation that is keeping so many top notch QA teams from ramping up their productivity to release mobile apps faster, and with far fewer defects.

The Main Obstacles to Implementing a Full Mobile Test Automation Strategy

Here are the 5 main mobile test automation challenges QA teams face when considering the implementation or the expansion of mobile test automation.

1. Finding the Right Mobile Test Automation Tool.

There are lots of tools out there, all claiming to have test automation abilities. That doesn’t exactly mean they will fit your specific needs, or to crush your specific challenges. There are some standards a mobile automation tool must meet in order to enhance your mobile QA:

The tool must be easy to use. It must be as easy as possible to record an automated test script.

It needs to run on both native and object web properties, making identification of the components of the app as precise and consistent as possible.

It should easily connect to the cloud.

It should enable more than functional testing to give the most comprehensive check of your app before it goes to your users.

We have a UI that lets you create a reflection of your mobile device on your monitor, and use the keyboard and mouse to operate the application as you would normally. If the device itself is in the cloud, you can recreate scripts on mobile devices thousands of kilometers away, and gain access to hundreds of devices that may not be available in your office. As you operate the mobile application over your monitor, every step you take is recorded on SeeTestAutomation as the next step in your test script. Once you are done performing the function, the automated script is ready. You can see the code immediately and add if/then statements, for/next loops, or anything else you need to customize your automation script.

SeeTestAutomation features an Object Spy which identifies properties by its web or native property. It goes right into the code so if the appearance or size of the element changes, the code itself, or at least the ID of an element will remain the same and the script will accurately target your functions consistently. This is vital in mobile as some elements will appear distorted over smaller or larger devices, and testing tools only targeting text or image recognition may miss the element, and the bug itself.

2. Integration into Existing DevOps or Testing Environments

What happens when you create a test, but you cannot use it because the mobile testing tool spits out scripts in testing environments you aren’t familiar with? In that case, you either replace the tool, the tester, or a combination of both.

SeeTestAutomation resolves the issue by integrating with all major mobile testing environments (Selenium, QTP, Microsoft Visual Studio, IBM RFT, Smartbear Testcomplete, Java, Pearl, Python, and Ruby). Once you perform all the steps on your app, and the SeeTest Recorder creates your test script, you can change the script over into any of these mobile testing environments.

The best way to scale mobile test automation is to expand it to the entire DevOps process. The ultimate aim is to automate as much of the development to deployment process as you can. This requires an automated mobile testing tool to integrate with the major DevOps platforms to ensure a fast and seamless continuous integration process.

You can execute your automated testing, then even as you sleep Ã¢â‚¬â€œ dreaming about the tropical island you will be spending your next vacation on, the project will be moved to the next phase of your development to deployment process.

To meet the needs of a rapidly expanding mobile audience you must cover an ever expanding mobile test matrix of mobile operating systems, devices, and different versions of your mobile application. A true automation tool can test on all of this, giving you the ability to conquer the entire test area with just one automation script.

The best way to truly conquer your test coverage is to use your automation tool in conjunction with a mobile cloud testing tool. The Cloud testing tool will enable you to set up a mobile lab with tens, even hundreds of mobile devices and their operating systems all in one place. A mobile tester from anywhere in the world can access any or all of these devices and run an automation script over all of these devices at once – regardless of the device, the operating system, or the version of the operating system or your mobile app, thus providing you with a massive coverage in less time.

Combine the automation tool with a performance tool and you have one potent end to end mobile testing strategy.

4. The Best Tech Support for Installation, Integration, Making Your First Test Script, Troubleshooting, and Mobile Test Automation Training your QA Team

It’s great to have all these features in an automated testing tool, but the real 500 pound gorilla in the room hasn’t budged! The process of installing mobile test automation into your DevOps or QA infrastructure can be daunting!

Is it possible to make installation simple?

At Experitest we have engineers that walk you through the process. They will even visit your business in person to personally guide you through every step. Our QA engineers have encountered most every problem and have a wide variety of solutions to hurdling almost any obstacle.

But what about issues that come up once we have automation up and running? Do you still provide support once we have the testing tool?

As a quality assurance company, we know the pain involved in dealing with unexpected issues. That is why our turnaround time is 3 times faster than the industry standard, making sure help is on the way right when you need it.

5. Learning A New Tool Quickly (or not at all)

The best test automation tools are those you don’t need to learn! If you are comfortable with Selenium or UFT, wouldn’t it be easier to simply integrate a mobile automation testing tool into one of these tools and expand it to mobile testing?

It would save you a lot of painstaking work if you could just open up a tab called “mobile” on your UFT tool and do what you have always been doing, only this time with mobile devices.

A good test automation tool lets you do just that. It will save you time in having to learn another piece of software by letting you utilize what you are already good at. For the new stuff you do have to cover, we make the training process as short and sweet as possible. We have trainers, certification programs, account managers, support engineers, as well as live demonstrations on how to get the most from your test automation tool.

The biggest challenge to achieving a new mobile testing automation strategy is to handle the toughest challenges with the greatest of ease. We make sure that the pain points are where you get the most support. We make it our duty to help you radically shorten your time to market so you can always present to your users the best version of your mobile application.

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